I School Research on Human-Computer Interaction at CHI Conference 2014

School of Information faculty and students are presenting their research on human-computer interaction in Toronto this week at the annual CHI conference.

The I School contingent joins three thousand other conference attendees from 49 countries to focus on the design, user experience, and engineering of all types of computer-based systems. The 2014 CHI conference runs from April 26 to May 1 and includes presenters from companies such as Google, Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo! along with scholars from the world’s leading universities.

Attendees and presenters are sharing ideas and research to design and implement elegant, secure, useful, and usable interactive environments that enhance the quality of life.

EnergyBugs: Energy Harvesting Wearables for Children

EnergyBugs are energy harvesting wearables with features that invite children to move their bodies to generate tiny, yet usable amounts of electricity. EnergyBugs not only convert children’s kinetic energy into usable electrical energy, but also let children power a specially designed LED lamp with the energy the children have personally harvested. EnergyBugs therefore turn the electrical energy into a tangible object that children can manipulate and think with. Two studies of EnergyBugs with 34 elementary school children have revealed that children carefully observed and negotiated the use of personally harvested energy with their classmates, as well as developed emotional connections to energy. In particular, moving their own bodies to generate energy led the children to more actively ask questions about energy from new perspectives. We report our iterative design process and discuss the implications of our results for HCI.

Incentives to Participate in Online Research: An Experimental Examination of “Surprise” Incentives

The recruitment of participants for online survey research presents many challenges. In this work, we present four experiments examining how two different kinds of “surprise” financial incentives affect the rate of participation in a longitudinal study when participants are initially solicited with either an appeal to intrinsic motivation to participate in research or one that also offers extrinsic financial incentives. We find that unexpected financial incentives (“existence surprises”) presented to people who click a recruitment advertisement focused on intrinsic incentives lead to a lower recruitment rate than do the same incentives offered to those who clicked an advertisement that led them to expect it. However, when potential participants expect a financial incentive, surprising them with a higher amount (“amount surprises”) yields a higher recruitment rate. We interpret these results in the context of crowding theory. Neither type of surprise affected ongoing participation, measured as the number of questions and questionnaires completed over the course of the study.

Extracting References Between Text and Charts via Crowdsourcing

Professor Marti Hearst
with Nicholas Kong and Maneesh Agrawala

News articles, reports, blog posts and academic papers often include graphical charts that serve to visually reinforce arguments presented in the text. To help readers better understand the relation between the text and the chart, we present a crowdsourcing pipeline to extract the references between them. Specifically, we give crowd workers paragraph-chart pairs and ask them to select text phrases as well as the corresponding visual marks in the chart. We then apply automated clustering and merging techniques to unify the references generated by multiple workers into a single set. Comparing the crowdsourced references to a set of gold standard references using a distance measure based on the F1 score, we find that the average distance between the raw set of references produced by a single worker and the gold standard is 0.54 (out of a max of 1.0). When we apply clustering and merging techniques the average distance between the unified set of references and the gold standard reduces to 0.39; an improvement of 27%. We conclude with an interactive document viewing application that uses the extracted references; readers can select phrases in the text and the system highlights the related marks in the chart.

A Study of the Use of Current Speech Recognition in an Information-Intensive Task

Professor Marti Hearst
with Shiry Ginosar

(From the CHI Workshop on Designing Speech and Language Interactions)
Speech input is growing in importance, especially in mobile applications, but less research has been done on speech input for information intensive tasks like document editing and coding. This paper presents results of a study on the use of a modern publicly available speech recognition system on document coding. We record the performance and preferences of 7 expert coders on two types of documents. Participants voiced concern about the well-known drawbacks of speech recognition: the response time was felt to be slower than desired and the recognition was thought to be not accurate enough. Other concerns include the need to work with others in quiet or loud spaces. However, some of the experienced coders preferred the speech interface because they saw the advantages of a multimodal design for this task, commenting on the reduced manual manipulation needed for typing, and a less repetitive feeling.

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia “anyone can edit”, has become increasingly less so. Recent academic research and popular discourse illustrates the often aggressive ways newcomers are treated by veteran Wikipedians. These are complex sociotechnical issues, bound up in infrastructures based on problematic ideologies. In response, we worked with a coalition of Wikipedians to design, develop, and deploy Snuggle, a new user interface that served two critical functions: making the work of newcomer socialization more effective, and bringing visibility to instances in which Wikipedians current practice of gatekeeping socialization breaks down. Snuggle supports positive socialization by helping mentors quickly find newcomers whose good-faith mistakes were reverted as damage. Snuggle also supports ideological critique and reflection by bringing visibility to the consequences of viewing newcomers through a lens of suspiciousness.